Memory №8: 1960s America. Max. ("Sex, Drugs, and Emptiness" / "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll")

The air changed again-this time it became thick, sweetish, and intoxicating. It smelled of marijuana, cheap wine, sweat, and something else-plastic, new, unfamiliar. I opened my eyes in the half-light of a room draped with Indian bedspreads and posters of Che Guevara. The Doors were playing somewhere, and Morrison's voice wailed about the end of the world.

After the suffocation of a Victorian parlor, California seemed like freedom. I ended up in a hippie commune somewhere near San Francisco. My "guide" into this new reality was Max-handsome as a young Apollo, with long hair and eyes as empty as a glass after a party.

We met at a music festival. He danced barefoot, his body moving with animal grace, a peace symbol dangling around his neck-an irony of fate, considering the war he waged with himself. He didn't speak; he proclaimed truths.

"Love is free as a bird," he said, handing me a flower. "We must share it with everyone, like sunlight!"

His room was strung with fairy lights; cushions and empty wine bottles lay everywhere. There were no doors-only beaded curtains. No bed-just a mattress on the floor, on which, as I later surmised, half of America had managed to sleep.

The first days felt like liberation. No prohibitions, no conventions. We made love under the open sky, surrounded by similarly "free" people. It seemed I had finally returned to something primordial. From the depths of memory, the dear images of Lorenzo and Siddhartha surfaced.

But very soon, I began to understand that this was only a cheap plastic counterfeit. The freedoms granted by this era expanded personal boundaries but led to the transformation of sexuality into a commodity, stripped of sacrality. Sexuality became a marketing tool, as recognizable, accessible, and sales-boosting as Coca-Cola.

One day he took me to a party at some producer's house. Glass walls, white carpet, and people talking about Zen and enlightenment while sipping martinis. In a corner, on a deerskin rug, a pair of naked bodies moved to a psychedelic rhythm, observed as if they were an exotic art installation. Someone handed me a glass, sweet and sticky, crooning, "Just one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small…" I felt not like a participant in a celebration, but like merchandise on a supermarket shelf-soon to be bought, used, and discarded.

Max changed partners like gloves, sincerely believing he was "spreading love." One would think he should be ascending the ladder of perfection. But his embraces were empty. They held neither Ariston's passion, nor Siddhartha's spirituality, nor Lorenzo's aesthetics. Only boredom, seasoned with weed.

Then an event occurred that for a moment seemed like a return to the roots. Max took me to a festival. Three days in the mud, under endless rain, in the midst of half a million others like us. It was reminiscent of ancient Bacchanalia, but on an unprecedented scale. Dionysian mysteries put on an assembly line. The crowd was a single organism, breathing in time to the music. The smell of damp earth, grass, and human bodies replaced temple incense. We were possessed not by the god of wine, but by new gods-Electric Ladyland and guitar riffs. And when, at dawn after a night of madness, Jimi Hendrix began his prayer of "The Star-Spangled Banner," I closed my eyes. The distorted sounds of his guitar were unlike the sirens' song or the mystical rhythms of the damaru. It was the groan of a wounded century. But within that groan was the same primordial magic, the same sorcery wielded by shamans at the fire or priestesses in my very first temple. The crowd froze, spellbound. It was a sacrifice-a national anthem offered up to a new, yet unborn freedom.

But the ritual lasted only a moment. When the last sound dissolved in the morning air, the spell was broken. Instead of sacred awe, there remained only fatigue, dirt under the fingernails, and the realization that this was not a revival of a cult, but merely its grand, disposable simulacrum. A mystery staged for commercial consumption. Ancient rituals lasted centuries; this one ended the moment the guitar fell silent. And we, the "flower children," dispersed to our homes like extras after a grand spectacle in which we never recognized our true selves.

One night, after another "group therapy session" involving a couple of his friends, I awoke to the click of a camera shutter. Max was filming us with his new camera.

"Max, what are you doing?"

"Relax, babe!" he exclaimed with genuine bewilderment. "We gotta share this beauty! This is what freedom is all about! Besides, we can make a few bucks for weed. I got a guy who made an order."

There was no malice in his eyes-only childish delight in a new toy and a complete misunderstanding of my boundaries. For him, I was not a person, but part of a concept, an abstraction called "free love."

Sex here had become anything-a weapon of protest, a commodity, entertainment-anything but art. It was put on display, given a price tag, and sold alongside plastic flowers, cheap incense, and Playboy magazine. The paradox of this revolution was that, having freed sex from the shackles of religion, it was immediately fettered by the chains of commerce. A sacred ritual was turned into a mass consumer product. "Free love" very quickly transformed into the pressure of "you must have sex." Quantity definitively triumphed over quality.

But the most tragic thing happened later. I found him crying after one of these "sessions." He sat hunched over, staring at the black TV screen where footage of some war flickered. The radio quietly sang about how everyone wants to change the world, but no one wants to change themselves.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"I… I don't feel anything," he confessed with horror in his voice. "Before, every intimacy was a discovery. Now… it's like chewing gum. There's flavor at first, and then nothing." "I can't get no satisfaction…"

He sought in quantity what could only be found in quality. In depth. In genuine connection. But it was too late; he had grown accustomed to fast-food love and had forgotten how to taste the exquisite flavor of life.

I left him on a rainy day. He gave me beads and a Castaneda book as a farewell gift.

The rain washed the smell of patchouli and illusions from me. The sexual revolution promised freedom but brought only a new form of slavery-slavery to the endless pursuit of new sensations, standing at a conveyor belt where great art was turned into consumer goods.

The familiar coffee shop again. The guy by the window was showing his girl something on his phone, and they were laughing. There was more genuine intimacy in their laughter than in all the orgies of Max's commune.

Another era, another attempt to find perfection in intimacy. And another victory of quantity over quality.

The next page of my album smelled of air conditioning and digital technology. Our time. The age of dating apps and virtual reality. But that is a completely different story.